They Haven’t Stopped

And they won’t. Arianna Huffington wrote this Monday, but she’s got it on her front page today with the other news from the service last night:

We need to recognize what has happened to our democracy and renew our efforts to fix it.

Today’s moment of silence was poignant, and we are being urged to follow it by ratcheting down the tone of our political discourse. But that’s not enough. Along with raising the politeness level, we must also have a real conversation about what kind of country we want to live in, and take practical, concrete action to create it.

No we don’t, you stanky bitch. Oops, was that hateful? I’m sorry, but my rage meter has been going up and up since about Sunday. Rest easy, though. I’m NOT a paranoid schizophrenic who questions math and believes that the government is trying to control us through grammar. Chance of violence? Zero.

Rage, paranoia, and division are not the only possible responses to the very legitimate anger millions of Americans — on both sides of the political spectrum — are feeling at the state of the country and the state of their lives. And the Arizona shootings put a spotlight on the need to redirect that anger, frustration, and despair, and use them to take action, and make life better for those who need help. We can choose connection rather than division. Understanding rather than fear. Reaching out rather than turning away.

Although I am currently raging, I am neither paranoid (WHERE the fuck did she get that? stay tuned) or divisive. Any lib can come here and debate. I ENCOURAGE it (unless you get stupid). Problem is, you can’t debate a liberal. IRL, if a liberal finds out that you’re a conservative, chances are you’re going to be shunned. Why? It has it’s history in this piece: The Paranoid Style in American Politics, written in 1964. It’s a neat little easy that basically explains that conservatives are … well, let me quote it:

In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

After Hofstadter, the American right wasn’t just wrong on policy. Its people were psychologically dangerous and undeserving of holding authority for any public purpose. By this mental geography, the John Birch Society and the tea party are cut from the same backwoods cloth.

That is how they see us.

Back to Arianna:

Given the baser instincts horrifyingly on display in Arizona on Saturday, that future is even more in question. So, as Sheriff Dupnik suggests, let’s do “a little soul searching” — and then let’s get to work.

It’s been five days since just about EVERYONE in the free world had access to the information that the shooter was mentally imbalance. Not right in the head. Showing signs that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. So, what do we need to search our soul for? Now, granted, she wrote this Monday night … but it’s headlined on her front page today.

Watching many on the right rush to congratulate the President for his supposedly compassionate speech, which included an ironic and hypocritical call for “civility” (NO LABELS, haters!) — after allowing his party and the media to spend five days suggesting that millions of Americans who happen to disagree with the Presidents policies were somehow co-conspirators to multiple murders, including that of a 9-year-old girl — it is clear to me why the GOP establishment and its supporters have consistently ceded ground to the progressives and to their agenda: they strive, above all else, to avoid being cast in a negative light by their political opponents. That is, they’re cowardly and cowed.

2 Comments on “They Haven’t Stopped”

the same old playbook….
“paranoid style…heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial…”… the left uses this same mantra, I believe, because they are truly unable to think beyond anything but the most elemental idea or argument…

they also tend to be as tedious as a leaky faucet… drip….drip………drip……